Workbook – Digital Journalism 2

During this second semester, I will be keeping a weekly workbook about what I am learning in the module Digital Journalism 2, I will also document here the process of creation of my assessment project which is an infographic.

WEEK 1 – Jan. 28th

Morning:

Meeting in the newsroom with all the lecturers to talk about the second semester

WEEK 2 – Feb. 4th

Morning:

Learning how to analyze data in order to create a story

Example of a video about World War II that showed statistics

Afternoon:

Overview of the work we will be doing during this semester

Talked about assessment 80% for one part 20% for the other

Visit website lynda.com

Creation of a graphic

WEEK 3 – Feb. 11th

Morning:

Discussion about the homework (analyze infographics about State Of The Union speeches)

Data terminology

Average, mean, median, mode

WEEK 4 – Feb. 18th

Morning:

Discussion about the homework (listen to the FT discussion between Sarah O’Connor and Tim Harford)

Presentation about data developing and data stories

Afternoon:

Excel Workshop

WEEK 5 – Feb. 25th

Morning:

Data presentation by George a lecturer from School of Engineering

Michael showed us how to find data sets

Afternoon:

Excel Workshop

WEEK 6 – Mar. 4th

Morning:

Discussion about the homework (find a dataset for our assessment project)

FightHoax presentation by Valandis Zotos

WEEK 7 – Mar. 11th

Morning:

Discussion about our datasets ideas for the assessment project

Looking for stories on Facebook with the Team 1 to analyse on FightHoax

Afternoon:

Meeting with Ryerson University (Toronto) and talk about the collaboration between the two universities (LSBU and Ryerson)

WEEK 8 – Mar. 18th

Morning:

Discussion about the incident that happened in New Zealand, and what we are supposed to do if we are the editor of a newspaper as something similar happens: how to describe the incident, what we are allowed to publish…

Pitching of our datasets ideas for the assessment project. I am currently working on the question “Is tourism in the UK affected by Brexit?” : For now it’s easy for people from Europeans countries to travel to the UK as we don’t need visas, but in case of Brexit, it won’t be possible anymore, so we can think that tourism rates will decrease due to that. Therefore we can wonder what impact Brexit would have on tourism, and do economy will be affected by that?

Working on FightHoax, analyzing facebook articles.

Afternoon:

Workshop on the software Adobe InDesign, learning how to use it in order to create an infographic.

Introduction to the website FastCharts which will help us create our infographic

I had to change the topic of my infographic because, in the end, I couldn’t find an actual story for my previous subject about Brexit. I had a one-to-one with Michael and he suggested me to do my infographic about infographics with the dataset that is available on Moodle and I liked this idea.

Afternoon:

Tutorial with LJ about the infographic

EASTER HOLIDAYS:

I started to analyse the dataset in order to know which will be my angle, so I chose to talk about “The science behind the most popular infographics”: I will show the different things that make an infographic successful, for example, the industry, the colours, the word count, etc…

I looked at all the free infographic maker websites that LJ gave in order to know which one I wanted to use, I chose Visme and I did the first draft for my infographic but I wasn’t really inspired and I did not like the result.

WEEK 11 – Apr. 29th

Meeting with Michael to talk about the assessment: I didn’t really know how to write my story so Michael explained to me how it was supposed to be.

I started taking some notes about the things that I want to include in the story

I tried Venngage, another infographic maker website because I didn’t really like the previous one. This time it was easier to create something that I liked so I kept using this website.

WEEK 12 – May 6th

I started writing the story for my infographic and I finished doing the infographic itself.